3The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston （MFA） is privileged to have the largest and most comprehensive collection of Japanese art outside of Japan. Now numbering over 100,000 objects, the MFA’s holdings range in date from the Jōmon era to contemporary times and include works in all media. The collection was largely formed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by a group of far-sighted Bostonians—Edward Sylvester Morse, Ernest Francisco Fenollosa, and William Sturgis Bigelow—and their Japanese colleague, Okakura Kakuzō. Generations of curators and collectors have remained dedicated to the early vision for the collection as one that should relate the history of Japanese art for the Western world and serve as a cultural ambassador between the United States and Japan. Due to the large scale of the Boston collections and the limited size of its curatorial staff, an assessment made by Okakura in 1905 served as the primary information on the MFA holdings for almost ninety years. In 1990, when the department of the Art of Asia celebrated its centennial, there were no curatorial files and few photographs of individual objects. Access to the collections was severely limited, and most of the research on individual works of art was published only by members of the curatorial staff. In 1991 the Kajima Foundation for the Arts made possible the transformation of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston Japanese collection by making an unprecedented commitment to support the study and documentation of the holdings of paintings, sculptures, and decorative arts. During a thirteen-year period, over twenty-five Japanese scholars under the inspirational leadership of Professor Tsuji Nobuo traveled to Boston to collaborate with the MFA staff under Anne Nishimura Morse on a comprehensive survey of the collections. Individual informational sheets were completed by the Japanese and American teams in Japanese and English; condition notes were also made in consultation with the conservation staff at the MFA. All of the works of art were photographed （condition permitting）, at first using black-and-white film, but later utilizing digital cameras. The first years of the project were primarily devoted to Buddhist art. Studies of the Buddhist paintings were conducted by Izumi Takeo with the assistance of Sudoh Hirotoshi （1991–92）; Buddhist ritual objects by Sekine Shun’ichi （1991–92）; Buddhist sculpture by Mizuno Keizaburō （1992）; and Buddhist robes by Nagasaki Iwao （1994）. In addition to these surveys Tamamushi Satoko examined the MFA’s Rinpa and Tosa paintings （1993） and Shimao Arata, assisted by Fukushima Tsunenori, the holdings of ink paintings （1993）. Tsuji Nobuo and Yamamoto Hideo documented the collection of early Kano school scrolls and screens （1995）. Studies of the MFA’s decorative arts included detailed cataloging of the holdings of Nō, kyōgen, and bugaku masks by Tanabe Saburōsuke （1994）.The second phase of the Kajima project opened with a study of the MFA’s extensive collection of ukiyo-e paintings. Tsuji Nobuo and Kobayashi Tadashi headed a team that included Asano Shūgō, Naitō Masato, and Timothy Clark （1996–97）. Studies of the paintings by the “Eccentric painters” Soga Shōhaku and Itō Jakuchū were conducted by Professor Tsuji and Itō Shiori （1997）. The Meiji-era painting collection was surveyed by Satō Dōshin and Takashina Shūji （1998）. Later Kano paintings were studied over a two-year period by Kōno Motoaki, Kawai Masatomo, Sakakibara Satoru, Kimura Shigekazu, and Yasumura Toshinobu （1998–99）.In a third phase beginning in 2000 Professors Kōno Anne Nishimura MorseCreating Open Access to Japanese Art:The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and the Kajima Foundation for the Arts Collaborative Surveys
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